Google has captured a large segment of the education market with Google Classroom and it's the most primitive software I use every single day.
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The urge to just make something better myself washes over me like some kind of hot flash every day. I know it's a bigger project than it looks, but I swear to god I had palm OS software made with more consideration and care than this.
I don't get how people think the future is coming and just around the corner when most software is like this.
Classroom feels like it's from 2002
@futurebird in my senior year of high school (which happend to be in 2002), the relatively young, ambitious physics/calculus teacher learned enough MySQL and PHP to be dangerous (after iterating through Flash and various other client-side approaches which I gleefully showed him it was trivial to crack open to extract the quiz answers). This turned into a classroom CMS which, fortunately for all involved, never really took off.
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@futurebird in my senior year of high school (which happend to be in 2002), the relatively young, ambitious physics/calculus teacher learned enough MySQL and PHP to be dangerous (after iterating through Flash and various other client-side approaches which I gleefully showed him it was trivial to crack open to extract the quiz answers). This turned into a classroom CMS which, fortunately for all involved, never really took off.
@futurebird I later went on to a job where I was sysadmin for WebCT and Blackboard deployments at a publisher who developed content for those platforms to sell with their textbooks.
These platforms were a miserable pile of Perl scripts and Java servlets.
It's always been like 2002 out there. I can only shudder at the thought of what Google has built in the past 10 years.
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@raven667 @futurebird @paul_ipv6
Orgs don't develop in-house at that price, they hire Deloitte to develop for them, which leads to nightmare scenarios where you pray for the quiet dignity of death by Google
@intransitivelie @futurebird @paul_ipv6 I know thats a common failure mode now, but a large generation of the standard on the internet, pre-web2.0, was tools and protocols developed in-house by Universities mostly to handle their large user populations. Kerberos and IMAP and even HTTP was made in-house so CERN could have a proto-wiki, they were not products from companies, that came later. On a related note, Sun Microsystems bought and open-sourced StarOffice (now LibreOffice) because they did the math and found that adopting the struggling StarDivison was cheaper than paying for MS Office and Windows Terminal Servers for the whole company.
We have so many tools for cheap rapid development, why dont more orgs just in-house or set up consortiums to split costs? I know its because no one gets fired for choosing MS or Google, but thats not the path to effectiveness or a way to do better than average, its a desperate cling to mediocrity out of some fear of failure if they actually try to be excellent.
Seems sad though.
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I’m reminded of the old faux Bell slogan: “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company.”
@rk @futurebird From last week’s Monsterdon, Night of the Comet (1984): “I’m not the phone company. Nobody’s the phone company anymore!”
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I've used obscure minecraft mods with better features and UI than google classroom.
@futurebird
The shade... -
I wouldn't be shocked if someone at google was shocked to find out that they still were running Classroom... although they did try to put "AI" into it for a moment and the schools lost their mind so they made it possible to turn it off for a whole school.
And I suspect that sort of reaction makes them say "these users don't like change, they don't want improvements and new features"
But that is NOT true. I'm miserable.
@futurebird yeah, if it was about keeping us in the ecosystem it wouldn't be so bad we had to export & import docs to submit homework.
It really does feel like they got halfway to linking up a bunch of separate products (Drive, Gmail, Meet, etc) and then got bored and wandered off. Given Google's long and storied history of closing down services they've lost interest in, I could well believe Classroom just got forgotten. -
Google has captured a large segment of the education market with Google Classroom and it's the most primitive software I use every single day.
On the one hand adding too much stuff annoys edu customers. On the other hand, it just has NO FEATURES, nothing you expect from "classroom" software.
For example, do you want to show an answer key to students after they post their homework?
Gotta do that by hand. Like a cave person.
@futurebird my first tech job was back in 1998 working on education software where the frontend was in the little known macromedia director, i was an idiot 18 year old who had no idea what she was doing, and we still did a better job than this. honestly the state of tech has been in a downward spiral since the 2000s, and it's appalling what we all put up with because some billionaire forced it on us.
anyway, commiseration that you have to deal with this slop.
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The urge to just make something better myself washes over me like some kind of hot flash every day. I know it's a bigger project than it looks, but I swear to god I had palm OS software made with more consideration and care than this.
I don't get how people think the future is coming and just around the corner when most software is like this.
Classroom feels like it's from 2002
@futurebird i so miss palm os. Sigh.
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The urge to just make something better myself washes over me like some kind of hot flash every day. I know it's a bigger project than it looks, but I swear to god I had palm OS software made with more consideration and care than this.
I don't get how people think the future is coming and just around the corner when most software is like this.
Classroom feels like it's from 2002
*panting holing on to the arms of the chair*
"I could make a better LMS than this! It's just a database pointing to a file storage system with a calendar! I could do it!"
I wait for the feeling to pass, but it has been happening more frequently. In the corner of the room a little demon whispers "do it, do it on apache and use PHP and mySQL, you know the way"
I shake my head holding back the tears. I do not practice those dark arts any longer...
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@futurebird i so miss palm os. Sigh.
So much of it was made by people doing their very best, pushing the hardware to the limit. It was really elegant in many ways.
It occurs to me that we have never or maybe only rarely seen what it'd mean for modern hardware to be "pushed to its limits" like that.
Think of what might be possible.
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*panting holing on to the arms of the chair*
"I could make a better LMS than this! It's just a database pointing to a file storage system with a calendar! I could do it!"
I wait for the feeling to pass, but it has been happening more frequently. In the corner of the room a little demon whispers "do it, do it on apache and use PHP and mySQL, you know the way"
I shake my head holding back the tears. I do not practice those dark arts any longer...
@futurebird Squint a little, and that “demon” starts looking like your better angel instead…
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So much of it was made by people doing their very best, pushing the hardware to the limit. It was really elegant in many ways.
It occurs to me that we have never or maybe only rarely seen what it'd mean for modern hardware to be "pushed to its limits" like that.
Think of what might be possible.
A more extreme example of "pushing the hardware" is some of the programming for N64 games of all things.
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So much of it was made by people doing their very best, pushing the hardware to the limit. It was really elegant in many ways.
It occurs to me that we have never or maybe only rarely seen what it'd mean for modern hardware to be "pushed to its limits" like that.
Think of what might be possible.
@futurebird i ran my entire physical therapy practice on it and a folding keyboard. I created a custom database for my patient data, visit notes, & billing using a palm os relational database program called handbase. It seamlessly integrated with MS Access when i docked my palm pilot with my computer and created all the mail merge documents i needed to run my practice.
This was in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Nothing since has been as elegant and as useful.
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*panting holing on to the arms of the chair*
"I could make a better LMS than this! It's just a database pointing to a file storage system with a calendar! I could do it!"
I wait for the feeling to pass, but it has been happening more frequently. In the corner of the room a little demon whispers "do it, do it on apache and use PHP and mySQL, you know the way"
I shake my head holding back the tears. I do not practice those dark arts any longer...
@futurebird So, so many applications give me this itch, particularity business-related applications. "This is literally just the front end on a database. How did they screw this up so badly?" And it's not even that I don't understand the process well enough because I've been steeped in it for years. I know what it needs to do, I know the edge cases, etc. Give me a few months and I could do this!
But then I withdraw for a time, and leave Middle-Earth to its fate.
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So much of it was made by people doing their very best, pushing the hardware to the limit. It was really elegant in many ways.
It occurs to me that we have never or maybe only rarely seen what it'd mean for modern hardware to be "pushed to its limits" like that.
Think of what might be possible.
@futurebird @LJ My favourite example of this is the rainbow effects generator for the Spectrum. It literally looks impossible for the hardware to do it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Spectrum_graphic_modes#Software_Hi-Colour
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*panting holing on to the arms of the chair*
"I could make a better LMS than this! It's just a database pointing to a file storage system with a calendar! I could do it!"
I wait for the feeling to pass, but it has been happening more frequently. In the corner of the room a little demon whispers "do it, do it on apache and use PHP and mySQL, you know the way"
I shake my head holding back the tears. I do not practice those dark arts any longer...
@futurebird I remember when #SharePoint first came out and everyone thought I was a crazyperson because I kept yelling "It's just wiki! I was doing this for my classes last year! Why can't you see this? IT'S A WIKI!"
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*panting holing on to the arms of the chair*
"I could make a better LMS than this! It's just a database pointing to a file storage system with a calendar! I could do it!"
I wait for the feeling to pass, but it has been happening more frequently. In the corner of the room a little demon whispers "do it, do it on apache and use PHP and mySQL, you know the way"
I shake my head holding back the tears. I do not practice those dark arts any longer...
@futurebird Don’t do it. You don’t want to end up the admin of your own platform where everything really is your fault. It’s much better to come here and bitch about someone else’s software.
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@futurebird People choose to use Minecraft mods, based on utility & convenience.
Nobody chooses a Google or Microsoft product, it's forced by IT.
@mdhughes
Software is sold to Finance bros and other execs. IT is told what to do and we do it, and then hear from everyone about how shit it all is.The admin side of Google education/classroom is a mess. Licenses are bought in batches and you'd better have enough student ones to cover all the "free" licenses for the staff.
@futurebird -
@futurebird Squint a little, and that “demon” starts looking like your better angel instead…
They are so often fallen angles aren't they? But do we forget why they have fallen?
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*panting holing on to the arms of the chair*
"I could make a better LMS than this! It's just a database pointing to a file storage system with a calendar! I could do it!"
I wait for the feeling to pass, but it has been happening more frequently. In the corner of the room a little demon whispers "do it, do it on apache and use PHP and mySQL, you know the way"
I shake my head holding back the tears. I do not practice those dark arts any longer...
@futurebird have you ever tried moodle? I used it a little when I took an instructional design class that used it and then used it to run a course once. It worked pretty well for what I needed, though I didn't use many of the features. Many cpanel hosts (like @reclaimhosting ) offer a one click install
